Patrick von Stutenzee's Gay Candy Blog: The Shamans Got It Right: Placebo Works

The results from a study into the workings of placebo products and the placebo effect show that a harmless substitute 'medication' works. The compound being made up of sugar or flour works just as well as the real thing containing pharmaceutically active components. Conclusions may be drawn with wide-ranging consequences.

The traditional way to do a medical study is to split sufferers of a specific illness into two groups. One group receives the real medication with active pharmaceutical compounds. The other group receives a harmless tablet looking for the entire world the same as the original medication in the test, but it is made of sugar or flour. In these tests, even the doctors handing out the medication don’t know if they are handing out the medication or the replacement called placebo. At least, that’s what the pharmaceutical industry wants us to believe.

In a twist on this traditional way of doing research, Harvard University Medical School just published the result of a study on the workings of placebo. Even the preliminary set-up of the study sounded weird. Patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) were split into two study groups; one group received harmless pills, the other nothing at all. To make everything quite clear, patients receiving the placebo pills were informed that the pills were just sugar and would therefore not work. Patients were asked to take the tablets even if they did not believe in the placebo effect.

While the doctors handing out the pills might have felt slightly foolish, the result of the study was a surprise. The belief of the medical community to date was that placebo products work because people believe it to be a genuine medical compound with active ingredients. But in this study, 60 percent of patients taking the placebo pills reported back feeling better and showing less symptoms. This rate of improvement was equivalent to the most effective of IBS drugs. Even more astonishingly, 35 percent of patients receiving no medication at all reported a reduction of their symptoms.

Based on these results, researchers involved in the study suggest that the mere ritual of going to see the doctor and submitting to a treatment was sufficient to improve their health. This is what a visit with the shamans did several thousand years back; their treatments were not scientific, but probably worked as well as most modern pharmaceutical compounds. Prove to the opposite have just become that much harder to show.

The placebo effect is often cited as the reason why alternative medical treatments like Homoeopathy, Ayurveda, Bach flowers, Anthroposophic Medicine, and others that could be named work as well as school medicine. There is absolutely no proof that they don't work on their own merits. This excuse is usually the last resort of the pharmaceutical companies to explain their stranglehold on the health sector.

The researchers of Harvard University Medical School have wisely (and with an eye on 'donations' coming from the pharmaceutical industry) refrained from pointing to the other problem they have put into the spotlight: The traditional set-up of a clinical study on a pharmaceutical product is done under the presumption that any placebo effect in it is near zero. If you adjust this to 60 percent and deduct it from all studies published over the years, none of these studies will be conclusive proof of working medication anymore.

If you expect more results to come from this special study, you will be disappointed. This study was a fluke; it probably slipped under the radar of the supervisors from the pharmaceutical industry in Harvard. As cash strapped universities are meanwhile completely dependent on the 'generosity' of the pharmaceutical companies to pay for their teaching staff and their research, the mere mention of withdrawal of funds will stop any further research dead in its tracks.

The last thing the pharmaceutical industry needs is proof that their products are equally effective as the laying on of hands by the local pastor.